Traditional cloud-based computer platforms operate by executing static code containing one or more predefined processes. This static code may then, at runtime, cause the generation of one or more instances, which are concrete occurrences of the processes. Thus, each user running a particular cloud-based application will actually be running a separate instance of the application.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are cloud-based platforms driven by business documents, such as sales orders in the case of customer ordering and sale processes, and production orders in the case of production and logistics processes. In all these cases, the business documents are an abstraction at the software level and use data containers for the processes, but they do not reflect the real physical occurrences in that physical process. Thus, for example, the customer may run an instance of a product-ordering process, which may cause the creation of a sales order for a particular product (for example, a particular model of mobile device with a particular serial number), but the sales order itself is not reflected in the instance of the underlying software process building it.
This leads to particular technical impediments when, for example, certain processes cannot be supported by older business documents. A major drawback with standard business documents is that they are local, i.e., company-internal. A sales order or a production order is not normally visible to other companies, which inhibits cross-organization processes, such as two different entities (e.g., customer and manufacturer) interacting with the same business document.